A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Business Leaders Changing the Business landscape: Duncan Lennox, Co-Founder and CEO, Qstream

Recent research reveals that 56% of sales teams are expected to hit growth goals that are at least 20% higher than last year. No wonder organizations are continuing to invest more and more in productivity solutions, spending some $20,000 per sales rep per year. Yet only half of these organizations say they have the means to adequately measure the results of all of this activity and investment. Could neuroscience and medical research be the answer to the sales productivity challenge?

That’s what the folks at Qstream believe. The innovative Boston-based company combines, mobile, science and software in a simple to use app that they claim is helping its customers, including many of the world’s top brands, outperform their peers by up to three times in average annual revenue growth.

Qstream positions itself as the only sales productivity solution whose effectiveness has been clinically proven in rigorous scientific trials to enhance sales capabilities and durably change behaviors with impact to the bottom line. They do this by letting sales reps participate in 3-minute challenge competitions pushed to their smartphone or mobile device every few days. Then the app’s analytics engine continuously synthesizes millions of data points into real-time insights providing its users with personalized coaching actions.

“We sell a sales capabilities platform into the salesforces of the world's largest brands. And what we're offering them is a platform that allows them to measure sales force capabilities, in near real-time, in a science-based and data-driven way. Are they effective as salespeople, can they add value when they're out talking to customers and prospects? And we do all of that by having the sales rep essentially practice these challenge-based scenarios in three minutes a day on their phone,” says Duncan Lennox, Qstream’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Science is fundamental to the service. Lennox’s co-founder, Dr. B. Price Kerfoot, is a Harvard Medical School professor who spent the last ten years doing clinical research into the neuroscience of behavior change. He was teaching at Harvard Medical School, and he knew he had some of the brightest, most motivated students in the world, but decided to ask the question—“are they remembering most of what I'm teaching them?"

To no one’s surprise he discovered the answer is no. As a physician and a scientist he decided to look at the problem by actually measuring what happens in the brain using FMRI technology to watch the processes that take place in the brain when you're remembering something, when we're trying to establish patterns and change behaviors.

Through more than 20 randomized controlled trials, which he conducted to the same level of rigor as a clinical drug trial, he developed and refined this methodology. Lennox got involved when Harvard wanted to take the methodology and spin it out and make it available to the broader world, which would later be commercialized as Qstream.

“I've been doing enterprise software for almost 25 years and I've never seen anything in the technology industry that's literally backed by proven science in terms of its effect on us. What we've then learned over the years is that the ability to practice scenarios in three minutes a day on your phone has enormous impact. The reps are essentially playing a game, they're competing against each other and scoring points, getting onto leaderboards, while the system is adapting uniquely to them. On top of that the data that we gather and the insights we can generate through our analytics technology is actually more valuable to sales leadership and senior leadership in these organizations that we work with. For the first time, they now have actual data on the capabilities of their salesforce and how to address any potential problems,” says Lennox.

The Qstream application can be integrated into CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, so data travels in both directions. “Now you've got this new feed, this real-time capability feed that's coming in as well that you can put into the mix,” says Lennox.

The company came to market with the product in the middle of 2011 and has more than doubled its revenues every year in those five years. Lennox won’t divulge exact numbers today, but he expects to continue on that trajectory going forward. With more than 80 employees, they have over 300 customers using the software. The company initially focused on the life sciences industry to give a focus to their go-to-market strategy on an industry with a large, global distributed sales force. Today they are in more than 60-percent of the top 50 life sciences companies in the world, including 14 of the top 15 pharma firms, and 7 of the top 10 medical device companies. Early last year they branched out into financial services and the technology sector.

“But the big high profile win for us announced earlier this year was a global multi-year deal for LinkedIn's entire salesforce,” says Lennox.